


the Thing about Technology...

by PrettyMissKitty



Series: the Old Guard - MISC. [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy is not bad with Tech, Gen, She rode horses before stirrups were invented, She watched Zero get invented
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:15:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26251033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyMissKitty/pseuds/PrettyMissKitty
Summary: Booker might be the Guard's official Tech Guy, but I don't think google would be Andy's handicap, because the thing about technology is that it's not about how old you are, it's about how closely you've been paying attention. Tech is only scary if you look away and miss something in its development (and you don't have the luxury of time to learn what you missed).Here's a short over-view of Andy's history with technology, because when she was young, Zero hadn't been invented yet!*Includes Historical Notes!__(Also, it's a one shot, but Ao3 keeps saying I've posted chapt 1/? and I don't know how to fix that without simply reposting, but I'd rather just keep it as is, with a note here. This story is complete & stand alone. There will be plenty more fic from me to come in this fandom, but nothing attached directly to this work...)
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Technology
Series: the Old Guard - MISC. [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1907041
Comments: 4
Kudos: 27





	the Thing about Technology...

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of fics I've been reading show Andy in a typical old-lady role of 'hates tech and can't use it', but I think she'd be just as much a boss at tech as she is at everything else (except making friends... she's not so great at that bit, but that's why she has Joe and everyone needs a weakness, right?).
> 
> But, in the movie, she demonstrates a solid familiarity with tech and an ease with working it (just not quite as much talent for it as Booker shows), so I think she's a BAMF with it, and I think she's got a pretty good reason why. I'm not a fan of the comic and the way Andy can't be bothered to learn any tech at all is one more point of contention I have with it. Because, yes, Andy is old, SO old, ACHINGLY old. But the difference between being an Elder and being an Old Fogie is how ENGAGED the older person is with the current goings-on. ^_~
> 
> Check the end for Historical Notes! I'm pretty solid on most of my histories and timelines, but if you see anything that looks wrong let me know!

**The Thing about Technology…**

The thing about technology and old folks is that the old folks usually missed something, some critically important step in leaning, not how to use a piece of tech, but the context of why it was created and therefore how to manipulate its variables.

Old folks can’t use a cell phone because they’re focused on the end result of making the photo-thing take pictures rather than on the process of finding a way to access the camera. They usually missed the developmental stage in tech when the camera was a physical button-press being grafted onto basic coding. And most old folks today certainly weren’t around for when ‘coding’ meant shoving paper punchout card by hand into a mechanical maw the size of god damn building and physically pulling levers to manipulate it.

Old folks generally can’t use tech because they weren’t there to see the layers of it get invented— and they can’t keep up with learning the how-to’s when they never learned the why’s. They look away for a second, distracted with Life, a job, or having kids, and suddenly the world is different and they can't sit down and backtrack until the figure out what they missed.

When one is an immortal, no part of that problem is really relevant.

Andy knows how tech works.

She even _likes_ most of it.

Well over 6000 years of technological developments and her ancient ass is still up on all the latest shiny things. It kills her with hysteric giggles how people younger than her age by over 40 fold think they can’t call her ‘kid’ with such disdain, and call her a ‘millennial’ with dismissive rancor even when begging for her help because ‘their gps is broken’ (the function is not usually broken, but it’s rarely been enabled).

Over 6000 years and Andy still remembers the first big new thing to make its mark upon the world. She’s old as sin itself at this point, but written Language was still fairly new when she was born… phonetics and syllable symbols were becoming more common[ [1] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn1) , but alphabetical written language? Woo, well that had still been mostly an experiment [ [2] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn2).

Likewise, the concept of zero was a pretty cool thing.

Zero popped up about 2000 years into Andy’s time on earth, though it wasn’t given it’s own symbol in the writing system until about a thousand years later[ [3] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn3).

Around that same time, saddle girths came into being[ [4] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn4) . And blink a few hundred years away ‘till when stirrups came along [ [5] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn5). As far as Andy was concerned, that was the moment when real warfare was invented. Elegant and noble warfare, at least, the kind with a grand strategy and careful deliberation in the use of armies.

Technically, war had been around for thousands of years before Andromache first drew breath, but only in the far east (as she would only learn after several millennia of fighting) had war become something other than foot soldiers and a few mounted units or those in chariots just randomly bashing up against each other.

A thousand years before Andromache became the scourge and savoir of Scythia, East Asia had made war into an Art, and by the time she was halfway through her 4th millennia, they'd even wrote a book abut it[ [6] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn6).

Bows and arrows had been around forever[ [7] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn7) , but the deign for a recurved composite bow came around as an exhilarating shock— appearing a little after girths and a bit before stirrups [ [8] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn8).

Combined, stirrups and girths and recurve bows made war into and elegant dance of skill and strategy— a contest in which there were clear victors and few civilians caught in the crossfire. What armies did outside of battle was another story, one that had such heinous chapters that Andromache wet her blade far more often in the chests of men dying off the battlefield rather than on it.

And the gunpowder came along[ [9] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn9).

Things got messy with gunpowder. War became less a contest of skill and planning, and more a contest ruthlessness and willingness to utterly destroy the object of one’s aim to conquer... no matter who got in the way.

Still, gunpowder meant the delights of fireworks and noise crackers and smoke-bombs for dramatic exits.

Even with the higher casualty count and increase brutality and suffering in battle, Andy counted gunpowder a solid boon.

And outside of warfare? Well, windmills were pretty cool [ [10] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn10).

Efficient mills made bread cheaper and made it taste much better than before— good, highly efficient mills made everything easier which lowered the risk of having a baker cheat you with most of the flour used to bake really being sand.

The magnetic compass was neat[ [11] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn11) , but what really drew Andy’s attention was the development of mechanical clocks and celestial calendars [ [12] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn12)— the metallurgy skills of her Scythian heritage could feel the hum of craftsmanship in the work behind their making.

Books were always pretty much magical, even when they’d been written down by hand. But once the printing press had been developed[ [13] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn13), Andy started reading everything available.

She perhaps wasn’t there for the invention of the oil lamp[ [14] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn14) , but the cleaner burn of kerosene [ [15] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn15) changed how Andy spent her nights, spending longer and longer into the evening enjoying time out on the town— at least until things got out of hand with air pollution and roughing it like the good old days before lamps and plumbing seemed infinitely preferable to staying in a city.

Skipping all the big-but-little developments, like railways / cars / planes and the telegraph (all of which Andy needed to utilize with capital effort to be effective in her self-appointed role as a from-the-shadows world-improver), Andy was there when electric lighting came to be[ [16] ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/40985852/edit#_ftn16).

1901 saw radios becoming legitimately useful in Andy’s line of work, which made a lot of things far easier. Conversely, 1935’s development of radar made many things much harder.

Room-sized calculators in the 1920’s and 30’s and 40’s gave way to legitimate computers by the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s… with the niche interest of computer programming and networking going from mostly military or home-grown super geek to entirely mainstream in a single blink once 1985’s release of an ATARI graphic interface hit. That was when tech really took off, in Andy’s mind, at least.

The pace of its development certainly exploded.

But the advantage of being an immortal is that she never had to look backwards to learn tech’s history. When something new came along, she could learn it with the benefit of having the full depth of its context there behind her to bolster her way passed any minor blips of confusion.

So, now, when Andy’s bored to death with waiting for the noise to start, she can listen to an audio book while playing CandyCrush or MarioKart Tour or PokemonGO and run up annoying threads of banal conversation in the group chat for her little Family.

Poor Nile’s caught between treating Andy and the others like people from her own tech-savvy generation and staring incredulously at a text message from Joe or Booker that reads more like the Constitution than like a plan for supper.

Sometimes the long-windedness is meant to be a joke to confuse her, and sometimes they forget she doesn’t really know how to take that kind of thing very seriously anyway.

It still turns out funny without any effort.

All in all, the only thing Andy cares about is the safety of her Family. She’ll exploit whatever tech she can to ensure their happiness and security.

The endless entertainment of YouTube is certainly a boon, but instantaneous wire transfers and multinational credit accounts are better.

Andy may be an old lady who cannot be arsed to care what TikTok vid is trending, but she’s also a kick-ass pioneer whose VPN can keep the CIA and such from getting at all handsy with her nearly bottomless cash accounts.

The thing about technology is that is less about how old you are than it is how consistently you’ve kept up with paying attention to the new developments— and with 6000 years of active learning under her belt, Andy’s got the patience to ensure that she always keeps herself perfectly up to date.

\- - - - -

**Author's Note:**

> NOTES:  
>    
> [1] Mesopotamian cuneiform was developed circa 3200-3500 BC, an ‘alphabet’ of syllabic phenoms.   
> [2] Semitic peoples in regions of Egypt and Phoenicia developed a truer form of alphabetic script, ca 2000~2500 BC  
> [3] Zero popped up in Mesopotamia around 3000 BC, but it was recorded as a blank space. It got a symbol in accounting archives in approx. 2000 BC.  
> [4] Girths appeared on the Kazakh Steppes around 700 BC.  
> [5] Stirrups appeared, also on the Kazakh Steppes around 300 BC  
> [6] Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’, published in the 5th century BC.  
> [7] Something ~71,000 BC shows artistic representations of bows being made and used in dozens of cultures.  
> [8] Recurved bows, the Scythian version in particular, began appearing regularly in ~500 BC.  
> [9] ~850 CE, gunpowder was invented in China.  
> [10] Windmills appeared in Persia around 950 CE, to both move water for irrigation and to grind down grains for flour.  
> [11] Magnetic compasses appeared in China around 1044 CE.  
> [12] The golden age of precious metalwork as a function high-art came in the 14~1500’s CE.  
> [13] Gutenberg invented his moveable type press in 1436, but China and Korea had woodblock printing in 800 CE and had a thriving industry of fiction being published before the western world invented the concept of a fiction novel narrator (‘Tom Jones’, by Henry Fielding, published 1749 is the one of the earliest western examples).  
> [14] Oil lamps appeared in the Middle East in 9000 BC.  
> [15] Kerosene was derived in the 1840’s~50’s, it burns cleaner than natural oils, but is cheap enough to be used at obscenely excessive volume. So an individual dwelling wouldn’t be coated in black residue, but whole cities would be—and with the other kinds of air pollution… yeah. Country living looked real nice.  
> [16] Edison’s light bulb was released in 1879 and Edison Electric had a working power plant established by 1882.
> 
> Also... I totally wasn't gonna publish this here for a while (like, maybe, /after/ I finish my Epic Bat-Fam WIP?), but it's my birthday and I have no self control and these magical, wonderful idiots have actually taken over my life. XD
> 
> (And if you're curious as to what ELSE I am / should be working on, check out my schedule and project lists!):  
>  [ September 2020 Schedule ](https://www.patreon.com/posts/current-project-41058519)  
> [ Project MasterList](https://www.patreon.com/posts/current-projects-30172736)


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